November 5th - November 11th 2001
Sunday Yes I Did It
Saturday At Swim, Two Boys
Friday Confidential
Thursday You were great
Wednesday Marmoset who?
Tuesday Guy Fawkes
Monday Birthday Boy
Sunday 11th November 2001
Tom is quite right to point an accusing finger at The Telegraph headlines - and not just for their treatment of domestic politics, either.
Today's edition of The Sunday Telegraph is a case in point. Under the headline Bin Laden: Yes, I did it, the paper carries a story about an interview in which the al-Qa'eda leader actually says no such thing.
Mind you, I can forgive them quite a lot for the recent story about how intelligent sheep are, and their memory for faces, a story which carried the headline Sheep are not just woolly thinkers alongside a picture of a sheep captioned, if memory serves, "I remember ewe."
(Note the file name for that story, by the way. Sub-editors at the Electronic Telegraph must get their jollies where they can; the file name for stories about our gallant prime Minister are always 'nblur..xml'.)
Saturday 10th November 2001
I'm a hard-hearted sod, as sods go, and I hardly ever cry these days.
Occasionally - but very rarely, and only in the dark - I find my eyes wetter than usual at some piece of cinematic schmalz.
But I don't think I've ever cried over a book.
Until I reached the last page of At Swim, Two Boys in the early hours of this morning.
It's an excellent book, beautifully written, a love story for unspeakables of the Oscar Wilde sort set in, and very much amongst, the Easter Rising in Dublin 1916.
Read it. And weep.
Friday 9th November 2001
Now here's an offer you don't get every day:
Dear Sir,I am the son of the late president of the Federal Republic of Zaire, President Mobutu Seseko (now Republic of Congo, under the leadership of Mr. Joseph Kabila). I presume you are aware there is a financial dispute between my family (THE MOBUTU) and the present civilian government. This is based on what they believe as bad and corrupt governance on my late father's part. May his soul rest in peace...
This sum of US$27M has secretly been deposited into a confidential security company, where it can be easily withdrawn or paid to a recommended beneficiary. The funds will be released to you by the security company based on my recommendations, on that note, you will be presented as my business partner who will be fronting for me and my family in any subsequent ventures...
Please, I need your entire support and co-operation for the success of this business ventures, your utmost confidentiality and secrecy is highly required, due to my family present predicament...
I sincerely will appreciate your acknowledgement as soon as possible.
Yours truly,
KASANGO MOBUTU
Cool, eh?
Sadly, I already happen to know it's a scam.
Thursday 8th November 2001
Occasionally, but only occasionally, even my own hypocrisy gives me pause for thought.
As you'll have gathered by now, Naked Night at The White Swan is not a particularly genteel affair. Indeed, part of its particular appeal is that especially English thrill of watching other people rapidly becoming even more embarassed than you. High blush-making potential.
The regular presenter, Rose Garden, handles things pretty well as a rule - though woe betide any audience member who dares get lippy. Every so often though, Rose has other commitments and Jimmy (part-owner of The Swan?) has to slip into the breach.
Ugh. Cancel that metaphor.
Jimmy must have compèred hundreds of Amateur Strip Nights in his time, and his well-worn innuendo has all the subtle charm of a fairground barker in the tenth circle of hell.
If no-one volunteers, Jimmy - fifties, Scottish, five foot five - will strike into the crowd and select a victim at random, touching them up as he talks at them, then physically dragging them onto the stage, where he'll attempt to flatter them into taking their clothes off by making references to how attractive he finds them.
And, believe me, listening to Jimmy talk about how turned on he is... let's just say it's a long way from erotic.
Every session he presents ends, in thudding predictability, with him reciting by rote, complete with a little mime: "And remember, here at The White Swan - weeee like Big Ones, weeee like Small Ones, but best of all...we like - The Ones Who Go In Between!"
Like, shudder.
Now, thinking back, it's possible, just possible, that there was a time when I would have liked to be thought attractive enough to be picked on a potential Amateur Stripper - though, trust me, there's no way I'd have ever done it.
Around about the time that I began to appreciate that, in some bizarre fashion, stripping might actually be considered an Empowering Experience, I slid decisively over the line from being someone you might be prepared to see naked to become someone you'd pay money to keep their clothes on. Ah well.
Nonetheless, knowing that accidents do happen (especially when drunk) I've always tried to catch Jimmy's eye when I'm in the Swan on other nights. I want him to recognise me as a regular, a power player, a person who will, in the unlikely event of him attempting to drag me on stage, gleefully punch his lights out without a second thought.
And he, of course, has always looked straight through me. One must count one's blessings.
So last night...
(Do you want to pause here and consider where this story is going? Get a grip: you already know this is so not going to end up with me getting naked.)
Last night, it was raining heavily outside and the mid-week crowd was noticeably thin. Jimmy had to work especially hard to get four or five nothing-special strippers up on stage. For especially hard, read particularly repellent: I spent most of my time as far away from the stage as possible, shuddering and grimacing at every little Jimmyness, exchanging nauseated looks with other regulars at every innuendo.
At the end of the night, as I was picking up my coat, Jimmy was standing in his usual spot by the door. And I, as usual, nodded and muttered a hello, expecting him to ignore me.
But no, he said hello. And smiled. Eek.
"One of your increasingly rare appearances in the spotlight then, Jimmy," I said.
"Did you enjoy it?" he said.
I tried to remember what a reassuring smile looks like.
"Was it all right?" he persisted.
"Ha ha ha," I replied.
"I just don't want to come across as an arsehole, that's all," he mumbled.
"No, Jimmy, you were great," I said.
And walked out into the rain, blushing furiously.
Pure coincidence, incidentally, that the first appearance of Graham Norton in the crowd at the Swan for several months should coincide with the announcement that Channel Four are considering promoting his show to a five days a week slot?
Who knows? I can only report that a member of his entourage was one of the people Jimmy dragged up on stage. And that they promptly turned around and walked straight off again.
No business like no-show-business, I guess.
As any Hollywood producer will tell you, what's really needed in This Great Campaign Which We're Embarked On is a world-class, top-notch, drop-dead-gorgeous Star.
On the home front, we're not exactly spoilt for choice.
La Condoleeza shows possibilities, especially since Annie Liebowitz's Vogue snaps proved that, when forced into a frock, she's a total babe. Pam Browne for that role, perhaps.
But Musharraf, Rumsfeld, Bush? Not even casting Kevin Kline as a jet-setting British PM is going to float that boat.
We need someone to play the Lawrence of Arabia role. Abdul Haq was the closest we've seen so far but, even before the Taliban got to him, he was more of a Auda abu Tayi: Anthony Quinn rather than Peter O'Toole.
But now, in our hour of need, please welcome: General Barialai Khan.
Gen Barialai, a snappy dresser with a weakness for ginger tea taken in porcelain cups, carries a handheld computer and arrives for interviews "in a cloud of cologne and trailing deferential retainers".
And best of all? If you squint just a little bit, he'd pass for a younger, more sensitive Sylvester Stallone.
Have his people call our people.
Wednesday 7th November 2001
"At the moment, when I tell people my name they say: 'Adler, as in Larry?'," claims the daughter of the recently deceased harmonica player.
Likely enough, you'd think. Until you spot what her name is. I don't know about you, but my first reaction on being introduced to Marmoset Katelyn Adler would not focus on her surname.
The man who invented the cheese and onion crisp has died. (Yes, I did say 'invented' - you thought they grew on trees?)
My name is Kitty. Acoustic Kitty.
During the Cold War, apparently, the CIA performed surgery on a domestic cat and turned it into a mobile bugging device, using its tail as an antenna. The experiment was abruptly, heh, curtailed when the cat was run over by a cab.
Norway's Fisheries Minister, the aptly named Svein Ludvigsen, has apparently suggested that his country's need to reduce the local seal population could be turned to advantage by laying on seal-culling trips for tourists.
Coupling that thought with the news that the koala population of Kangaroo Island has reached dangerously high proportions raises interesting possibilities.
Could be just the thing for the kids this Christmas.
Never mind spurious personality tests that aspire to measure your sensuality (78%) or your blogalcoholism (64%); seems to me it's much simpler to pose the binary choice: Sopranos or West Wing?
Personally, I'll take the former over the latter any Thursday night of the week. Slightly perplexing to see the Emmys committee disagreeing with me - methinks they voted the flag.
Tuesday 6th November 2001
About the most joy I got out of my November 5th birthday evening this year was getting home to discover that the youths I told off for skinning up outside my front door the other day had not, in fact, shoved a firework through my letterbox by way of reply.
I've had deeply mixed feelings about Guy Fawkes Night ever since I was a child.
A boarding school education meant that I was never in the company of people close to me on my birthday, so my own little anniversaries tended to be subsumed into the noisier anonymous delights of commemorating a long-dead anarchist attack on authority. (Sparkler, Dr Freud?)
What little personal celebration that there was reached me courtesy of Her Majesty's Mail. On my 11th birthday my father despatched a cake with an entire soccer team on it. Eleven men you see, but... hmmm. (Eleven men in a plunge bath would have been more like it.)
So even from an early age, Bonfire Night has been mined with lonely pre-emptive cynicism, further complicated by the constant uncertainty of whether it was supposed to be celebrated on November 5th itself, or on the nearest Saturday. And increasingly heralded, especially lately, by the startling annoyance of bangers in stairwells for weeks beforehand. Bah.
On the third hand, I do like fireworks. Maybe it's a gay thing: all that soaring expense of noise and colour, each rocket implicit with a dying fall.
(At the RVT's displayette on Sunday, we joked we'd had a man for every firework they let off: the ones who soar way over your head and leave you with nothing but a cricked neck, the ones who fall over and lie there fizzing on the floor, the ones who go off in your hand...)
Every year though, on the night, if I'm free, I try to get myself somewhere I can watch a lavish public display. Blackheath one year, Battersea another - though the latter was marred by the severe burn I gave myself volunteering to coax a child's reluctant sparkler into eventual life.
This year, confident of the company of close friends on both the night before and the night after, I said sod it and volunteered to work on my birthday night, happy in the thought that there are probably worse places to be than on the 15th floor of a landmark building that offers clear views over most of London.
Height, it turns out, is not quite the advantage it ought to be, because with height comes distance, and all the various multi-coloured pops and whizzes are dwarfed by the standard urban vista of house and street lights: the fireworks themselves resemble nothing so much as the bubbles in a glass of champagne: mildly festive but a little short on ooh and aah.
So next year guys, I promise: no more cussed indifference. We will arrange to visit a spectacular display. We will get very drunk and wrap up warm. Sparklers and class C drugs will be widely distributed. And I will be one year older. What joy.
Monday 5th November 2001
OK, the results are in.
If, as I like to imagine, my birthday is typical of the twelve months to come, the next year shouldn't be too bad, containing as it will:
365 cans of Red Stripe
Mild toothache
Friends texting me at 8am and being astonished to find me awake
365 pleasant phone calls, 3,650 pleasant e-mails - and no spam
And no bills!
Sundry episodes of mildly unsatisfactory sex
Good books finished; great books waiting to be read
Bulk purchases of coffee and cigarettes
Lots of offstage banging, with distant explosions
People refusing to believe I'm really that old
People realising I'm old enough to be their dad
Short siestas
Premieres of great movies in the papers
Halfway interesting movies on tv
Cheese omelettes, prawn sandwiches, cous-cous
Low-level fiscal panic
Vaguely threatening but immensely attractive straight foreigners on trains
Ongoing laundry crises
An undemanding 25 hour working week with an annual income of £20k
And, hmmm, no music at all.
I guess I can cope with that. Bring it on.
Many thanks for your assorted birthday wishes: I shall do my best to live up to them - whilst trying not to dwell on the unavoidable thought that whatever I do today sets a template for the twelve months to come...
......previous entries